Episode Archive

Ralph Nader and Bill McKibben on "Why Technology Will Not Save the World"

From the recent Teach-In on "Why Technology Will Not Save the World," we hear Ralph Nader of the Center for Responsive Law and author of many books including, most recently, Unstoppable, and Bill McKibben of 350.org. and author of The End of Nature and numerous other books.

KBOO speaks with Colby Clipston, Oregon Director of Wolf-PAC, and Chris Agudelo, Lead Organizer & Educational Advisor at Wolf PAC, and Dave Carlson, Wolf-PAC Volunteer, about their campaign for Free and Fair Elections in America. They are working to pressure State Legislators to pass a Free and Fair Elections Amendment to the Constitution.

We speak with John Paisley and Joe Lamb of The Borneo Project, which brings international attention and support to community-led efforts to defend forests, sustainable livelihoods, and human rights in Borneo.

The Borneo Project is hosting a fundraising event on December 14th at Mississippi Pizza to support the movement to stop the construction of 12 megadams in Sarawak under a governmental program called SCORE.

We speak with John Paisley and Joe Lamb of The Borneo Project, which brings international attention and support to community-led efforts to defend forests, sustainable livelihoods, and human rights in Borneo.

The Borneo Project is hosting a fundraising event on December 14th at Mississippi Pizza to support the movement to stop the construction of 12 megadams in Sarawak under a governmental program called SCORE.

Joseph Gonzalez, organizer, and Angelica Lim, media representative with the Portland Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, (PCHRP), talk about “For Whom: We Rise Together, International Human Rights Day” today (December 10th) at 6:30pm in the Native American Student and Community Center at Portland State University.

The cultural event aims to reach a broad audience from Portland and to build bridges and solidarity across communities in an effort to raise awareness about human rights violations nationally and globally.

We hear excerpts from a conference sponsored by the International Forum On Globalization. Scholars and activistsprovide an analysis of why immediate change is required in our thinking, behavior, values and economies.

Speakers are David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University on: De-Extinction and Its Residue Problems; Doug Thompkins of the Foundation for Deep Ecology on Technology & Nature/Clash of Concepts and Wes Jackson of The Land Institute on Nature Is The Final Measure.

Listen to the full 4 hour broadcast above, or click on the different programs bellow to listen to individual recordings.

Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks but for many the problematic history of the creation of this holiday casts a shadow on what Thanksgiving is supposed to represent. On Thanksgiving morning, on KBOO, we bring you Indigenous voices on a Colonial Holiday.

We hear another reaction to the failure to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. Ian Masters of Background Briefing speaks with VERNELLIA RANDALL, emeritus professor of law at the University of Dayton and the author of the book Dying While Black.

Glenn Greenwald interviews James Risen, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner, who sounds off on the government's attempt to imprison him, profiteering in the War on Terror, and his radicalization process. ​(From Ian Masters at KPFK, Los Angeles)

James Risen covers national security for The New York Times. He was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2002 for coverage of September 11 and terrorism, and he is the coauthor of Wrath of Angels and The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB. - See more at: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/James-Risen/28023961#sthash.q8On3cWj.dpuf

Audio

The growing movement to limit the "rights" of corporations and rein in their destructive practices at the local level through ordinances and ballot initiatives is explored with Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and Paul Cienfuegos of Community Rights PDX. Hosted by Paul Roland.

This program highlights the upcoming KBOO co-sponsored event with an interview of Pete Stauffer, Ocean Programs manager for Surfrider Foundation by Ross Freeman Levin.

On thursday, July 25th the Portland Chapter of Surfrider Foundation is hosting the Oregon Summer Soiree at the Holocene (1001 SE Morrison) in Portland from 6pm to 1am. The fundraiser will include an Art Show, Silent Auction, Heart and the Sea film screening, raffle, music by the Renegade Stringband, and much more! Proceeds will benefit the Portland Chapter of Surfrider’s ‘Clean Water Campaign’.

Old Mole Joe Clement, and Kathryn Sackinger talk with sociology grad-student and Jacobin Magzine editor Peter Frase, about the idea of an unconditional and universal basic income. Because basic income often stirs strong feelings about people deserving their livelihood, they also spend a lot of time talking about prejudices against those who don't work in a conventional job and problems in the distribution of what counts as work. They consider what full employment really means and how it harms people when one-sided jobs rhetoric dominates economic justice conversations.

Below are links to articles and organizations mentioned during the show. If you would like to hear more on KBOO about basic income and the politics of work, please don't hesitate to email Joe.

The music and stories you hear at the beginning in the middle and at the end of the show are Utah Phillips singing "Hallelujah I'm a Bum".

Andrew Geller speaks with Dr. Ted Schuur, an Associate Professor in the University of Florida's Biology Department and Principal Investigator of the Permafrost Carbon Network, discuss permafrost and what's happening to it in a rapidly warming Arctic.

Host Jay Thiemeyer speaks with David McNally about his book Global Slump, which analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. McNally argues that – far from having ended – the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation.

McNally locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, he highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. In Global Slump McNally offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South.

David McNally is professor of political science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books: Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (1988); Against the Market: Political Economy Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (2003); Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor and Liberation (2001); Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (2002; second revised edition 2006); and Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism (2011). His articles have appeared in many journals, including Historical Materialism, Capital and Class, New Politics, and Review of Radical Political Economics. David McNally is also a long-time activist in socialist, anti-poverty and migrant justice movements.

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq.

The departure of the last U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 left a broken country and a host of unanswered questions. What was the war really about? Why and how did the occupation drag on for nearly nine years? And why did the troops have to leave? Now, in a gripping account of the war that dominated the last decade, investigative journalist Greg Muttitt takes us behind the scenes to answer these questions and tells the untold story of the oil politics that played out through the occupation.

Greg Muttitt was previously co-director of campaigning charity Platform, which exposes and fights the environmental and human impacts of the oil industry.

Since the Iraq war started in 2003, Greg has investigated the hidden plans for the future of the country's oil. This work took him to meetings where the US and UK government officials lobbied Iraqi decision-makers, and to meetings where Iraqi oil ministry teams discussed their future oil policy with western companies. He met some of the oil executives who hoped to benefit from transforming Iraq’s oil industry, and the government officials and advisers they worked with. Greg also got hold of hundreds of unreleased British and American government documents, which described their plans and actions to reshape Iraq’s oil industry.

But Greg also talked to ordinary Iraqis, and a few politicians, about what they wanted to happen to their oil. He attended Iraq’s first anti-privatisation conference in Basra, and the meeting in Amman at which Iraq’s trade unions decided they would fight the oil law the US was pushing. He made many Iraqi friends, and came to know some of Iraq’s foremost oil experts. These experiences gave him a very different perspective from what we read in the papers.

Host Michelle Schroeder Fletcher speaks with professor and author George Lakeoff about his new book, co-authored with Elisabeth Wehling, called THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic. Lakeoff says the Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. He offers Democrats and progressives language to communicate their moral values clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time. He also deconstructs the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse.

George Lakeoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Don’t Think of an Elephant!, among other works, and is America’s leading expert on the framing of political ideas. Elisabeth Wehling is a political strategist and author working in the U.S. and Europe. She is doing research in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, on how politics is understood both in American and Europe.

Host Marvin Simmons speaks with Rajiv Chandrasekaran about his new book Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. From 2009 to 2011, he reported on the war in Afghanistan for The Post, traveling extensively through the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar to reveal the impact of President Obama’s decision to double U.S. force levels. HIs previous book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone won numerous awards for non-fiction.

When President Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran followed. He found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places; and headstrong military leaders who sought a far more expansive campaign than the White House wanted.

Chandrasekaran explains how the United States has never understood Afghanistan—and probably never will.

Host Marianne Barisonek speaks with Dennis Marker, author of FIFTEEN STEPS TO CORPORATE FEUDALISM: How the Rich Convinced America’s Middle Class to Eliminate Themselves From Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party Movement.

Never has a philosophy of a country shifted as radically as it has the last thirty years. Marker details in pull-no-punches prose how the assault on the middle classes is widespread and relentless. Determining our actions today can move us towards either a stronger, more positive future, or a future shrouded in fear, poverty, war.

In a full frontal attack by what Marker calls the Corporate Feudalists, Marker details how the middle class has become superfluous to the very rich and why various policies were deliberately created to eliminate them. Their defining characteristic is dirty, scorched-earth partisanship carried out regardless of cost. Conservatives are anxious again to finish first – with the big prize- monopoly control of the American government, and the power to turn their ideology into the law of the land.

Comments

Please ask Mr. Naito if his love of democracy extends to his business. Would he be willing to turn his development firm into a employee run cooperative corporation, giving ownership and organizational rights to employees. Mr. Naito's concern for democracy probably ends at doors to his corporation. Mr. Naito looks at this battle to develop the Hood River riverfront property as a public realtions battle. He will promise the community jobs and the city council financial support, and the council will eye the property tax revenue as a benefit to the community. If he is successful, once again we will be selling our responsibility to the land and the river for a short term gain. Mr. Naito cares little for the community, but operates on greed. If the environmental laws and regulations were not in place he would not be concerned at all with the impact of his development on the river, the wild life, and the ability of people to enjoy what nature have given us for free.

Bravo for having this debate, though. And controlling the civility of the debate.